Coyote Blog

Last week I volunteered, along with 100+ other people, for an 8-hour shift at the Phoenix area's largest vaccination station, located at State Farm Stadium (the oft-name-changing home of the Arizona Cardinals football team).  Someone really did it right.

I often criticize public efforts for their inefficiency and poor performance, but this one is certainly an exception.  Granted, it is being run as a public-private partnership and my gut feel is that the Blue Cross Blue Shield folks have a lot to do with the success, but partnering for expertise is a perfectly reasonable way to get a job done and the government seldom is willing to admit it needs help.

The entire operation uses one section of the stadium's massive flat parking lots.  They have created an assembly line for those being vaccinated to move through the process without ever leaving their car.  The whole setup has the feeling of a Disney ride or an assembly line.  Those being vaccinated are greeted at the first station and checked in against their reservation.  Their reservation number is written on grease pencil on their window.  They then proceed station by station to get their vaccine and to get checked for any negative reactions on the way out.  In between volunteers with ipads walk car to car in the queue for each station, asking screening questions, gathering data, or at the end making appointments for second vaccine.  The number on the windshield allows these volunteers (I was one) to quickly access the relevant portion of that visitor's records.  It is clear someone has load balanced the stations, because there might be 12 of one sort of station followed by 8 of another that cycle faster.  From front to back the process requires about 30 minutes, including the mandatory 15 minute wait for negative reactions.  Patients have an email waiting for them with their selected appointment time for a second shot before they even drive off the property.

The whole process never stops, running for 24 hours a day.  We volunteers get the training we need through a 15-30 minute overlap with the last person doing the job (most of us are on our feet with the iPads or with parking flags).  The biggest staffing bottleneck are the trained medical professionals needed at the vaccination station and at the end to monitor for negative reactions.  Thus all the rest of the process is designed to leverage these folks, to make sure they are doing only medical tasks -- a large force of volunteers without medical skills (eg me) do all the rest under the supervision of a surprisingly small permanent management team.  The medical folks for example at the actual vax station are not asking background questions or managing records -- this is all done with non-medical volunteers -- so they can focus on sticking needles in arms.  This is important because the medical professionals are the most limited resource and the hardest to keep deployed 24 hours a day.   I really have a lot of love for those folks because it is a long, long shift, rivaling any in a Chinese sweat shop.  Those of us non-medical volunteers just did it once or twice, these folks are doing it day after day.

The rest of the volunteers are frankly easy to get, despite it being a really long shift (especially the 10pm - 6am one), because folks who work a couple of shifts get the vaccine on the way out.  So soliciting volunteers mostly consists of running a sign up site and handling the deluge of traffic in the first 5 minutes after new spots open.  I will say it was a pretty amazing volunteering opportunity.  First, the number of well-organized volunteer efforts are, in my experience, really limited and these guys totally had their act together.   I worked at the end of the process, walking the line of cars waiting out their 15 minutes, scheduling appointments.  It was not unusual to have an older person crying and telling me they could finally go see their grandchildren after 12 months of isolation.

I thought a bit about whether to even bother, as I have never been very worried about COVID risk, but I have to travel a lot and I worry about whether the Biden Administration may put vaccine requirements on travel at some point.  Plus I work with about 800 folks over 60, so at the end of the day it made sense for me.  However, the second vaccine really has me in a quandy.  New reports have first dose effectiveness at 92+% vs two dose at 95%.  Are they really going to put this scarce resource in my arm for +03% effectiveness  (probably in the error bar of the studies)?  On the other hand, they have already scheduled me for x day and time for #2 and its part of the process that you agree to come back for the second.  I will think about it, but frankly I will be happy if the state decides to delay second doses for a while.

It is hard for me to imagine anything that white surpremacists could do to permanently impoverish African-Americans than some of the things the woke are supporting.  Case in point is this story from Oregon:

The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages "ethnomathematics" and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.

An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 "Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course," which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for "dismantling racism in mathematics." The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California's San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.

Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways "white supremacy culture" allegedly "infiltrates math classrooms." Those include "the focus is on getting the 'right' answer," students being "required to 'show their work,'" and other alleged manifestations.

"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," the document for the "Equitable Math" toolkit reads. "Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."

Steve Martin used to have a comedy routine where he would say something like, "wouldn't it be funny to teach your kids how to talk wrong.  On their first day in Kindergarten class they would walk up to the teacher and exclaim, "Mumbo dogface in the banana patch!"  That had a certain dark humor to it but teaching kids to do math wrong in real life is simply insane.

There are a lot of things that set the groundwork for this, and I am not an expert on post-modernism and critical race theory.  But one factor that is not often credited is a cargo cult mentality.  Folks look at successful white people and observe they all went to college, and then infer that if we just get all the black kids into college, they will be successful too.  Their resulting plan is to reduce or eliminate standards that are perceived to be keeping black kids out of college.

The problem of course is that college is not the cause of prosperity, but a marker (with prosperity) of other traits -- focus on long-term goals, discipline, hard work, and yes knowing 2+2=4.  This sort of woke BS just makes it worse, because it attacks the real roots of prosperity.  There are real barriers to poor blacks achieving prospecity -- eg how do you focus on long-term goals when you don't know where you are sleeping tonight or when you have no role models who do so -- but the purity and objectivity of math is not among these.

This sort of cargo cult thinking can be seen all the time in Progressive economic proscriptions.  The government push for home ownership is another -- middle class people own homes so if low income people owned homes they would become middle class.  Now, this has a bit of accuracy in that, like the stock market, the elite have goosed the housing market to always go up.  But leaving that aside for a moment, owning a home vs renting is a terrible decision for many people -- it piles on a lot of financial risk but perhaps more importantly it limits geographic mobility which used to be critical to lower-income people improving their lot.

We already have an economic, utility-scale electrical generation technology that does not produce CO2 -- nuclear power.  We do not have a second choice that is anywhere close to ready.  Wind is stupid, for reasons I have written about before.   Solar has its uses and I am all for the march of technology on solar panels.  But they are not going to keep the world's economy growing or, more importantly, prevent wholesale poverty and starvation and misery from energy shortages.

Most peoples' negative perceptions of nuclear come because the technology that is still in use is over 60 years old.  It is not one generation out of date but two or three behind the capabilities that currently exist to build safe, clean reactors. I have for years made the argument that government forcing of certain endeavors (nuclear power, space flight, transcontinental railroad) ahead of their natural development curve actually tends to set back the commercial development of them, and I think this was the case with nuclear.  To the extent that waste and safety problems persist with nuclear (and they really don't), R&D to solve them would be much more productive and less expensive than investments in Solyndra.

Of course we probably won't do this, because "knuckling under to the irrational fears of your Left-leaning political base" is the new definition of "following the science."

By the way, here is a way to think about the nuclear waste problem:  We all pay attention to nuclear waste because it and its negative effects are concentrated in small, heavily-impacted sites.  We don't pay attention to coal-burning waste, or didn't until recently, because it is distributed all around the world's atmosphere.  But I would argue the nuclear waste problem is much better, because it is much easier to mitigate harmful problems in a 100-acre site, rather than in the entire Earth's atmosphere.**

**Postscript -- pretty sure I first heard this expressed way back in the late 1970s, when US energy policy (under both Ford and Carter) was to promote coal, even to the extent of banning new power plants using cleaner fuels.  I wish I can remember who said it and give them credit because it really was prescient.

So apparently Disney and the Mandalorian team have kicked Gina Carano off the show.  In the past she has aggravated the Left by expressing skepticism about modern Transgender ideology.  But according to the WSJ, the immediate cause for the final parting of the ways was this:

On Tuesday, Ms. Carano shared an Instagram story, or a post that disappears, that read in part: “most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views,” according to a report in Variety on Wednesday.

Perhaps this is missing some context, but I have a hard time disagreeing much with this statement, much less advocating someone be subject to the modern woke blacklist.  As I understand the modern Hollywood rules,

• It is wrong to employ any actor for a role, say, as a deaf gay Aleut unless the actor is also deaf, gay and Aleut
• It is simultaneously wrong to cast a tough, blunt, unsubtle, possibly non-empathetic actress who has  strong feelings on totalitarian governments as a character that is tough, blunt, unsubtle, not particularly empathetic, and has strong feelings about the totalitarian Imperial government.

Of course, another thing the Nazis did was blacklist Jews from the public square and most any sort of employment.

I just bought a company with a few seasonal gift shops and camp stores but they have this expensive kludgy NCR Point of sale system they use.  It reminds me of doing business with IBM in the 80's.   Apparently every piece of hardware costs a fortune -- I kid you not an add-on credit card chip reader was priced at $1000 -- and they have to have their own server somewhere running software rather than a cloud solution.

I want a simple cloud-based POS system that might be appropriate to a 3000-sq-ft store with a half million in sales a year.  Anyone have good experience with one.  Hit the contact button or email me at coyote - at - this blogs name dot com.   Needs to be more capable than square, maybe several hundreds sku's, but not some mainframe system that might have been developed for Sears.  I am not a merchandising / retail guy at heart so I don't even know where to start.

COVID has not been easy, but our service business has managed to continue to serve customers in the same ways we always have.  As I have written before, other companies in the service sector seem to have a different attitude and to be mailing it in, with the average loss of corporate IQ being about 20 points, and probably 40 points in the financial services sector.  I have been working every day until after midnight because I have to spend my 8-5 job tediously coaching service providers through their jobs so our company can get what it needs.  I have a 40+ person reminder list on my desk of service providers I have to call every day to remind them they owe me something.  I then start my real day in the evening, getting done the actual work I have to do for my company.

Here are two stories from this morning:

@FISGlobal, formerly Worldpay and a bunch of other names, is a large credit card processor with who we have about 7-8 accounts.  I just was set up on their online portal last month and tried to log in the first time.  I had the user name and password right (everyone should use Lastpass or something like it), but they insist on also asking me challenge questions (eg name of first pet) that I get wrong for the obvious reason that I have not set them yet.  You can set them the first time you log in, but either I did not or I have not logged in yet.  I tried every reset mechanism they have but none of these will proceed without... wait for it... answering the challenge questions.  So I tried to call.  No luck. Absolutely no phone number.  So I emailed.  Two days later I have had no response.  It is simply astounding that one of the top merchant processors in the world cannot manage to fix a 60-second log in problem on less than a 48 hour (and counting) turnaround cycle.

So I tried today to find a phone number.  I finally called the Worldpay general number and they said they could not help me.  I asked for the correct phone number, they said they could not give it to me.  I insisted.  I got grumpy.  They finally gave me an 800 number.  It turned out it was the number for office depot.  I almost have to respect the customer service agent for giving me a fake number like I was some creepy dude in a bar, but I still cannot log in.  As soon as things get better, I am switching providers.  The other merchant processors may have been just as bad in COVID, but at least their support is reachable (I have had good experience with stripe in my online accounts).

@USbank.  These guys are really headed to the hall of fame of service fail, even against the low bar of other banks.  Previously I wrote about my experience last month, where I needed their deposit slip template for the MICR data on the slip so I could get deposit slips made by a 3rd party printer.  I have accounts with 44 banks, including some really small ones, and 43 immediately produced this when asked.  For US Bank I went to every branch of theirs in town and NO ONE had ever heard of such a thing nor could they produce it.  I waited on hold for 4 hours with their customer service and they had no idea, but read up in some book and decided that I could have one for the cost of $500.  LOL.  Finally I just bought $19 of their own deposit slips that I was never going to use but I could send to the printer as a template.

So over the same period I have been trying to change our corporate name on an account to reflect our post-merger status (same FEIN, different name and structure).  I again go to the local branch folks, and to the 800 number, and they promise service, but nothing happens.  So I call back and they have never heard of the request and we start over.  In the middle of this I now need to open a second account (we have campgrounds in rural locations and in two places US Bank is the only reasonably close choice).  So I go to the branch (the world of banking makes you show up in person to open a corporate checking account, even if you have to fly across country to do it) to open the second account and all seems well, they ask me to come back.  So I come back the next day, and it is not ready.  We set an appointment, and I come back then.  Again it is not ready -- they tell me (wait for it) that my corporate name has changed with the state.  No shit, I answer.  I am pretty sure the dude I am talking to is one of the ones who I had asked for the name change to be done earlier and dropped the ball.  He says they are going to have to close all the accounts and start over.  When I seem impatient, he gets mad at me and tells me it is my fault for, get this, not telling them the corporate name has changed.  Aaarrggghh.  But bankers are one millimeter from government workers and you have to be obsequious and pretend that they are infallible and so I said yes sir thank you sir when can I come back yet again for the new accounts?

Postscript:  Please!  Will someone please come up with a way that I can convert cash and personal checks in rural locations into dollars in my Phoenix bank account?  I pay credit card processors about 3%, I would happily pay 3% to Walmart or someone else to do cash concentration for us.

Over the past year, I have spent a staggering amount of my time trying to get service providers who are supposed to be the leaders of their business to do their damn job.  I literally keep a list at my desk with a list of reminders I need to send out to service providers to do what they promised.  This list is never less than 30 names long.

More than the COVID life disruptions, more than the fear-mongering, more even than our merger, the most exhausting thing for me over the last year has been the utter inability to reliably delegate anything to a third party without constantly having to coach them through their job.

I see many reasons this is occurring.  These include:

• Lack of employees due to either sickness or else difficulty in competing against high unemployment payments.
• Closure and elimination of services that companies always wanted to eliminate but they can now blame on COVID.  For example
  • Hotels stopping maid services and room service
  • Banks closing tellers and branches
  • Airlines not serving meals or drinks
• Unwillingness to adjust to the current reality.  Banks are high on this list, demanding things they have always demanded but that are impossible to do in the last year

But these do not encompass the whole problem.  There are a lot of companies in their core functionality that seem to have simply forgotten how to do what they do.  Even after 6 phone calls, Amerigas can't take and fulfill a simple order for bulk propane delivery;  Iron Mountain, who I like and invest in, can't reliably provide any of their core services accurately and on the first try; I don't think Intuit even picks up the phone anymore.

My hypothesis is that people are getting too far ahead of themselves in saying that COVID proves that the centralized workplace is dead.   I think we are going to find that this is not true at all, that there are networks in the office that spread both knowledge and accountability that are lost with all this home work.

I have run a company for 20 years where every employee works out of their home, or more accurately, where every employee moves their home (RV) to the workplace.  My employees work in over 400 spots.  And one thing I have learned vs. years of working in Fortune 50 offices is that you have to build a special process for this situation.   In particular, my constant focus is how how to centralize complexity.  I keep trying to take complexity out of field locations and managers and centralize it in a few office people where it is easier to train and build tools and create backups, etc.

My hypothesis is that companies did OK for the first month or two with work at home as well-trained employees carried the momentum of office work styles to their house.  But as time passes, and the staff turns over, the lack of traditional knowledge-sharing, support networks, and accountability systems are causing service functionality to degrade.

For most of the past year I have been hammering on the media for their destructive COVID fear-mongering.  By always cherry-picking the most alarmist opinion on every topic, and filling articles with carefully calibrated fear-provoking language, they have made us all dumber.

Let me give you one example.  For literally months, day after day, our AZ papers have been screaming that emergency rooms are filling up and telling the public they may soon be lying untreated on some hallway floor or not allowed into a hospital at all.  The articles were in my email every morning -- maybe some day I need to piece together a supercut montage of them all but my guess is most of you have experienced something similar.

I know zero about hospital management but even I can look at ICU data and see that the narrative is substantially more complex than what is in the media.  Here is the AZ state tracking report on state ICU bed utilization -- dark gray is total and red is COVID-related in some way.

The implication in the media is always that a 80% full ICU plus the equivalent of 30% of the beds with new COVID patients = zero capacity and people dying with no treatment.  But that is clearly not what happens.  AZ ICU's have run at 80+% capacity utilization since June 1, while COVID bed use in that time has drifted from 10% to 60% but we were never out of capacity.

There is clearly some complex management process the goes on with the management of ICU capacity.  In fact, it seems like someone knows what they are doing here.  Why don't we ever, ever get to hear that story?   I can't think of one hospital administrator I have seen interviewed in our local papers discussing how this management process works.  The only people they ever interview seems to be that one nurse with PTSD screaming that her hospital is a dystopian nightmare.

Perhaps this capacity management is being done with little cost, deferring non-urgent cases.  Perhaps someone is missing out on care to defer to the COVID folks.  Perhaps this is entirely normal in every winter flu season.  We don't know because apparently the media has decided it is not interesting, or at least not as interesting as the reactions they get when they have everyone as scared as possible.

In my transpartisan climate plan the other day, I wrote this:

Point 3:  Eliminate all the stupid stuff

Oddly enough, this might be the hardest part politically because every subsidy, no matter how idiotic, has a hard core of beneficiaries who will defend it to the death -- this the the concentrated benefits, dispersed cost phenomena that makes it hard to change many government programs.  But never-the-less I propose that we eliminate all the current Federal subsidies, mandates, and prohibitions that have been justified by climate change. Ethanol rules and mandates, solar subsidies, wind subsidies, EV subsidies, targeted technology investments, coal plant bans, pipeline bans, drilling bans -- it all should go.  The carbon tax does the work.

So what do I mean by "stupid stuff."  Well a good place to start is solar roads, but I have already flogged that not-dead-enough-yet horse many times. So let's find a new example -- cash for clunkers.  The original cash-for-clunkers program that paid fixed government payments for old cars that would then be destroyed was billed as both a stimulus (sells cars!) and a CO2 reduction (newer cars mostly all more efficient than older cars).

In fact, it did neither.  It turned out that the stimulus was virtually non-existent, as it just pulled forward sales that were already going to happen.  And while there might have been a teenie bit of CO2 reduction, it occurred at ridiculously high cost-per-ton (meaning the same investment in any number of other approaches would have reduced a lot more CO2).

Incredibly, given all this, Kevin Drum wrote recently:

Cash for Clunkers! My favorite stimulus program of all time. Sure, I agree with the experts who say that it’s not all that great purely as stimulus, but as a way of making stimulus popular it couldn’t be beat. More like this, please.

This is the man who, on not one but two occasions, responded to a detailed critique of mine on something he wrote by saying he had "science" on his side.  Are these guys even trying any more?